Potential Realized.

Understanding Customer Touchpoints

Whenever a customer encounters your brand, you’ve created a “touchpoint.” This could be anything from a social media comment from another consumer to a piece of direct mail to a television or radio advertisement. When your current or potential customer notices your brand, what’s the scenario? Analyze your customer touchpoint with these three questions.

There are a million questions you could ask to analyze a customer touchpoint. What are the circumstances? Who initiated the touchpoint? What is the current or potential customer’s next move? Instead of getting bogged down in details, focus on these three big questions.

When a customer sees your brand, what passes through his or her mind? This is the focus of a customer touchpoint analysis. There are innumerable variables that will impact a customer’s thoughts, but these three questions should be the center of your analysis.

What’s Your Baseline?

If you don’t know what customers think of your product before an ad campaign or interaction with your brand, there’s no way to tell how much that customer touchpoint moved the scale.

Review your customer insights and collect the data you need to establish a baseline. This is one of the most important steps of a customer touchpoint analysis.

What Do Customers Care About?

Make a two-column list with your company values on one side and the values of your target consumers on the other. These are your value drivers. How do they relate to one another? If your business cares about long-term sustainability and your customers care about going green, can you roll out a program that emphasizes your environmental awareness to potential customers?

Where are customers encountering your brand, and how much credence do they give to each media? If you’re a restaurant owner and you aren’t listed on Open Table, does anyone care? What about Yelp? You need to know where your customers are interfacing your brand, and which instances are having the most impact and influence on them.

Take a step back. Before looking at the customer, take a look at your employees.

While it’s important to have a firm grasp on your consumers’ motivations and values to analyze customer experience, start by activating CX from within. less effective methods of infusing customer focus from an external perspective don’t work in today’s market.

It’s not enough to conduct customer surveys to try and see what the customer sees: these efforts will only take into consideration the employees who have direct contact with customers.

What’s My Measure of Success?

The primary objective of a customer touchpoint analysis is to drive customer value. You’re not focusing on sales or leads in this process — those will often come about organically with a good customer experience. Instead, look at key performance indicators, such as the willingness of someone to recommend your brand, retention rates, and lifetime value of the customer. It’s a long-term process.

Customer touchpoint analyses should be a part of every business’s growth strategy, regardless of size. As your company grows, it’s even more important to be aware of exactly how customers are perceiving your organization. The insights you’ll gain from properly conducted customer touchpoint analyses will be invaluable as you see the flaws, strengths, and weaknesses of your business from an outsider’s perspective.

Contact Us

Contact Us

Potential Realized.

Since 1998, CMG has collaborated with some of the world’s fastest-moving companies to achieve an uncommon ambition: Potential Realized. Our work has generated over $2 billion in revenue for Fortune 1000 companies. With inventive thinking, collaborative execution and agile response to fast-changing market dynamics, we move our clients up and to the right.